[Hans Sieber]

Hi Ben,
the whole relinking topic when using RED material refers to the possibility to colour grade the material in a grading system after you finished your edit. As RED records raw files you don`t have a final picture when you open the RED files. If you don`t intend to do a grade outside of your Avid then you don`t need to think about relinking. The problem with RED material is that you as an editor have to do the baslight grading when you open the files in your avid. I`m not in front of my Avid but after opening the files via AMA you can then interpret the footage by clicking on the clip in your AMA bin and then open the clip menu. I don`t know the exact name of the function in the clip menu look up the manual. If you use this function a new window appears where then can make a baselight grading. And here comes the tricky part. You have to know how the picture was shot. Using RED you can do a lot in the setup of the camera like the ISO settings. Also you have to choose the Colour space and Gamma that was used during shooting. These parameters also depend on the firmware of the camera. You see it`s very difficult to do it right. Best way is to get the DOP to tell you what settings he used and what look he intended for his pictures. The Meta Data that comes with the RED files is in most cases neither complete nor correct. And to make it even harder you have to do the pregrade on your desktop monitor which ist never sufficient for doing the job. You often have to try a setting then apply it and check it on your HD video monitor.
If you intend to do the grading in a grading suite you have to export an EDL after you finished editing and deliver it with the original RED files to the post facility. They can then relink to the original RED files and do the whole grading on a machine intended for that.

Hope I could shed some light on the workflow.

Yours sincerely Hans

[Hans Sieber]

Hi Stan,
when you use the Pan&Scan effect on your 4:3 footage you basically crop the image on the top and bottom as Michael stated. To get a 4:3 picture in a 16:9 format you have to change the “proportions” of your image. You need to create an image that is wider than your original. To achieve this you use the Pan&scan effect. When you drop it on your footage you set the source button to 4:3 and the target button to 16:9. Then you can decide how you want to crop the image. That means if you want to crop more of the top part or the bottom part. You do this with the v position slider. In the end you have “cut out” a portion of your original 4:3 picture in the 16:9 aspect dimensions.
Hope I could be of some help.

Yours sincerely Hans

[Hans Sieber]

Hi David,

I can`t add anything to what Mark and Kris wrote. Concerning the pixel aspect question: If you import the HiRes Clips there`s no change to the pixel aspect ratio. Just when importing the proxy files you don`t see the whole image. They are square pixel. Nothing wrong if you`re working in HD but in SD you can miss stuff that is happening at the horizontal edges of your proxy. The x after DNXHD185 means 10Bit instead of 8 bit.

Hans

[Hans Sieber]

Hi David,
you just got ahead of me. After posting my reply I saw your response. If you want to work with the proxy files your workflow would be something like this: Import the proxies from your subclips bin on the XDCam disk, edit the show and then do a batch import of your cut. I would not recommend editing with proxy files. They are so heavily compressed that working with them is a pain for your eyes. Additionly to that the sound is recorded at 8Khz which makes it impossible to judge whether the sound is ok or not. Regarding your question of file size:
The Hires Clips are normally 50Mbit/s. If you are working for example with the MPEG50 resolution in MC you get the same file size as on disk. If you`re working in HD then the files will become bigger if you transcode to e.g. DNxHD120. The proxies are very small (MPEG4). Be aware that the proxies are square pixel. You won`t see the whole picture (on the sides) in your avid while editing.

Hans

[Hans Sieber]

Hi David,
just in addition to what Mark already wrote, you should not copy the media to a hard drive before either importing them into MC or opening it using AMA. Every XDCam disk has a unique UMID Number. This number makes it possible to identify the disk if you e.g. want to rebatch material from the disk for further use. By copying the disk to a drive you`ll loose that identification. So if you want to batch import the material in the future you have to be absolutely sure you`re inserting the right disk when batch importing. this may sound trivial but I had quite some issues with that. A network I`m sometimes working for tried to copy the XDCam disks to a central server in order to speed up the import time into MC. At one point they had a serious crash of their Unity and had to rebatch some projects. Unfortunately the editors had been very liberal with the disk labels which made it quite cumbersome to batch import the lost material. Mark is absolutely right with his workflow. Mount the disk via AMA and then consolidate the material to your hard drive. Using AMA you can skip sorting out the material in the not so comfortable PDZ software.

Hans

[Hans Sieber]

Hi Arica,
normally you don`t have an alpha channel with raw material. If you digitise from tape for example theres no alpha. There are two ways of implementating the alpha channel in pictures. The first way is the delivery the alpha channel separately from your material. The second is premultiplication. Each title you create e.g. is a premult, which means that the picture is multiplied by the alpha matte.It`s a rather large field I´m touching here. An alpha channel is basically a black and white picture that represents the transparency information of your material. It can range from full white to grey to black. Each value represents if the picture is fully opaque or partially transparent or completely transparent. Each time you use the avid title tool avid creates an alpha matte for your title. Without it you will only see the title itself and not the picture beneath it. Just create a title drop it above a picture in your timeline and use the “delete Effect Button”. The picture below will no longer be visible. This is just one use of the alpha channel. Other examples would the animatte effect, any form of luma or chroma keying etc.
Hope I could shed some light on the issue for you. If not let me know.

Hans

[Hans Sieber]

Hi Arica,
what do you mean when you write “But after it imports, it turns into a Matte and the footage is black.” Do you have a real time matte effect after importing? If so you should check the ignore alpha box in your import options. Of course only if you dont need the alpha signal. You are sure that the QT is encoded in Avid DNXHD? If so then the import should work without problems.

Hans

[Hans Sieber]

Hi John,
happens to me all the time. As soon as you got more than one drive connected to your avid the media creation won`t stick. I`m not sure but I think that avid simply uses the drive with the lowest letter (starting from c: if you don`t check filtering of launch drive) It`s especially funny if you`re working in a Unity/Interplay/Editshare environment and your machine crashes. After restarting you have to check the media creation settings.

Hans

[Hans Sieber]

Hi Alex,
sorry to hear you`re still having trouble with your sound export. I don`t know if there`s a problem wit hsub clips in general. In my experience sub clips are no problem. If not then the whole Avid ProTools workflow would be pretty much useless because subclipping is a common choice for preparing your material. In the first place i would try to reimport your OMF Sequence you sent to the sound dept.(check that your avid system doesen`t see the original media on your drives) and take a look at the handles. If they are with sound then avid did export the material. If not you can then try to do another short export of your original sequence and check that one. I don`t think there`s a general problem with subclips but that doesn`t mean there isn`t one. Check the versions of your avid/ProTools systems. As posted earlier older Avid versions tend to put out funky results with new ProTools systems.
Hans

[Hans Sieber]

I think Job is right about avid downscaling the material during capture. As he said you should try to change your project to hd do a batch capture/Import and then change back to SD. You then have to downconvert the hd material to SD. All this applies to file based workflow.v Working with HD Cam, in my experience capturing HD tape-based (HD Cam) material in an SD project results in better quality than down-converting the material in Avid. The down-converters the quite expensive sony machines use seem somehow better than the software based conversion.

Hans